We are studying children with a schizophrenia or affectively ill parent. The first phase of the project involved the assessment of 244 families and 539 children, including 31 families and 79 children with a schizophrenic parent, 128 families and 266 children with an affectively ill parent, and 60 normal control families with 152 children. A three-year follow-up was conducted on 84% of the families and 85% of the children. We are now following up the 594 young adults who have entered the age of risk for adult psychiatric disorder. Our data include measures of: 1) psychological functioning of the parents; 2) the environment, including family functioning, marital adjustment, parenting practices, and the child's phenomenological ratings of life events; 3) social, cognitive, and personal competence relevant to normal childhood development, including peer, teacher, parent, and self-ratings; 4) early signs or precursors to the development of schizophrenia, or affective disorder, including cognitive slippage, attentional deficits, hedonic capacity, depressogenic attributional styles, and subsyndromal affective patterns. Our goals are to: 1) obtain a detailed picture of the characteristics of children with a parent diagnosed as schizophrenic or affectively ill; 2) related child characteristics to parental diagnosis and environmental variables; 3) identify particularly vulnerable and invulnerable children; 4) assess the ways in which the child and family are affected by the stresses of psychiatric disorder; and 5) identify precursors to schizophrenia and affective disorder.